Is Tax Reform Fueled By A White-collar Army Of Willy Lomans?

July 11, 1985|By Howard Means of The Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — According to Richard Darman, the deputy secretary of the Treasury and a likely successor to David Stockman as budget director, the ''populist'' wave that will carry tax reform through Congress isn't being fueled by any intellectual appreciation of supply-side economics. It's not the result of a special understanding of the benefits the proposal will confer on the ''people.'' Rather, the motivating force is disappointment, a national -- specifically, a white-collar -- disenchantment.

In essence, Darman said that we have become a nation of Willy Lomans.

Like the grimly unforgettable hero of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, we've been tempted by the siren song of wealth, promised that if we only walk into the jungle we can come out rich. But it has been a false song, a bum promise. For most of us, even those of us who have climbed far enough out of the fields and mines and away from the assembly lines to wear a tie to work, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only another wet place to sit down and try to figure out what in the heck has clobbered us.

I confess to having missed the speech where Darman delivered himself of these thoughts. It was April 15 -- tax day, appropriately -- and what he had to say got only a few paragraphs in The Wall Street Journal, before disappearing. But when one of the four people most responsible for forming U.S. economic policy aligns himself with the politics of despair -- when he suggests that national despair, not national hope, is driving policy -- someone ought to take notice.

The crux of this new, melancholic white-collar populism are the ''Rinso- blue collars,'' the ''pass-for-white-collars,'' in Darman's words -- the workers who have moved out of redneck, hard-hat, factory America within this generation. Their numbers are enormous: Since 1960 the white-collar work force has doubled, to about 55 million employees or 55 percent of all jobs, while blue-collar workers have fallen to about 30 percent of the work force And as Darman tells the story, their grief is as great as their numbers:

''They are caught in what might seem a quiet con game. Many have worked their way 'up' from blue-collar backgrounds. They have changed clothes; yet, in many respects, they have not significantly changed their place. And although it may not be clear on the outside, they know on the inside. . . .

''I suggest that the latent emotional impetus for tax reform is tied to the sense that somehow the white-collar world is a bit of a fraud. It is a sense not merely that the white-collar social pretense is misleading; but also that, for millions and millions of white-collar workers, they have somehow been victims of a con.''

In support of this thesis, Darman quotes from a truly remarkable source -- Joseph Heller's stridently bleak novel about American managerial life, Something Happened.

''In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid,'' says Slocum, Heller's narrator and presumably Darman's prototypical white-collar worker. ''Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are afraid of at least one person. . . .

''At work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely.''

This, then, is Richard Darman's version of the new populist wave: angst- ridden, dread-filled, the victims of an existing tax system that -- in Darman's formulation -- taunts them with the prospect of capital accumulation but denies them access to capital, and hence desperate for the fairer and flatter tax that the administration Darman serves in has offered up.

Read another way, of course, they also could be victims of the capitalistic system itself; but such a high-ranking member of Ronald Reagan's economic brain trust would never think that.